Progress Update: Save/Load, Unit Leaders, Titles

Just a quick update to celebrate that I’ve finished the new Load/Save code and gone through a few rounds of testing and bug fixing. I know this possibly seems like a weird thing – every game has Load/Save, how can this be such a big deal? Well, it is, because writing Load/Save code which is fast, robust and maintainable is a pain. A lot of developers sacrifice performance and flexibility in order to use 3rd party libraries and save time. I have taken no shortcuts and loading a game, including the randomly generated world takes a few seconds. I’m very happy with this, as I really hate long loading screens, and want to do my utmost to make launching the game as fast as possible. I’ll make a short video showing this during the coming week, which will hopefully make up for the sin of this being yet another “all-text” progress update.

On other fronts, I’ve added unit commanders, with names and titles relevant to the culture/unit type. These are mostly for flavor at the moment – they can interact with various event chains, but you cannot send them on missions like other followers. Their stats will become relevant to more than story events when I finalize the new battle system, and at that point I will also add functionality to promote or replace them (since it might really annoying to have a craven lunatic leading your elite cavalry.

This also gave me a chance to spend some time improving the title generation code. Military, religious and noble titles are generated with language and culture taken into account, and the range of possible titles has been increased.

The next thing I will be working on is finalizing the latest iteration of the dungeon mechanics, which incidentally is the theme of the next design diary. I am somewhat delayed with regards to that post, mostly due to time spent on save/load, but hopefully the video will make up for the wait.

About

Wizards and Warlords is a turn-based fantasy grand strategy game currently in Early Access.

Play as a wizard or a warlord (not yet available in Early Access) in a fully-realized randomly generated world. Forge a great empire, become a master of the arcane, defend the world against ancient evils and planar invasions, build grand cities and great fortress, or be the outsider, mostly watching, only interfering when history is unfolding in a way not to your liking. There are many ways to play the game.